WoW, those who seek simplicity have conceptual problems and allergies! Tell that to Steve Jobs. 
I do like the format of this piece of hardware, but in its present form it is USB only. As it is based on the Raspberry Pi platform it wouldnāt be hard to include other outputs as part of the design brief but that hasnāt happened here which is a shame.
I personally would be tempted to put Ropieee on it to simplify it further as it seems to come with an OS designed to do a lot of things not required in Roon.
Well, a simpler cancer treatment worked really well for him, now didnāt itā¦
(for those who donāt know, Jobsā cancer was apparently of a rare type that you can conceivably live with for a while. He reportedly not only decided he knew better than the medical community, but once heād screwed himself hard enough, used his tremendous financial ressources to try to jump in front of the line to live a little bit longer).
Anyway, I was very specific in what I said, and the way you twisted it is emphatically not it. There are many manufacturers who have the āsimplicityā crowd covered. Thing is, as every Apple user (and Iāve been one for the past 20 years or so) knows, simplicity costs money. What I did do is recognize the obvious reality that there are people here who canāt fathom the complexity of the duplo-level (ok, meccano-level) assembly skills that are required to put together a Pi streamer, or who make enough that getting someone to do it for them makes more sense to them. Itās something thatās said absolutely without judgement: nobody should expect a fish to be good at climbing trees.
This all said, Iād LOVE for either RoonLabsā industrial designer, or a user with serious industrial design chops, to partner with, say, Wicked Aluminum, or, for the sake of cost control, someone who does Corian, to provide a less fugly alternative to the SBC cases for common endpoints (letās say Allo, HifiBerry, Orchard). In a perfect world, add a dedicated Roon remote volume knob built on something like GreyHillās TouchEncoder, and integrate that with an option to have it shipped bolted in and supported.
The problem will be cost. Siegfried Linkwitz (yes, that Linkwitz) explains it very well. And people will inevitably start asking why $200 in parts retails for a grand.
I personally donāt see this as something where RoonLabs can provide a whole lot of value at a reasonable cost (both in terms of support, and in terms of relationships with their partners) to them. Iād be happy to be proven wrong, though.
Simplicity costs money and so does a Nucleus. No need to be aggressive and condescending on this forum. Folks are stating their wishes, no need for you to to shoot them down, try to have the last word and pontificate. Peace bro!
Thatnks for the pointer! And through it, to Burning Amp, which Iām chagrined to see I just missed.